The one thing I may have had a native taste for was composition. I had feelings which I could not have explained as to forms of expression; I had at the back of my mind sometimes what seemed to me a right phrase and I groped for it. Writing was not a mere nuisance. Whether I had any ability I have no ground for saying. I must usually have been aping forms I had observed in books and newspapers. That I had begun to euphemize I know, because I said in an essay on holidays that some people waited for the twelfth of August, instead of saying that they went grouse-shooting. Running his pencil through this decidedly, my form-master substituted the natural and direct phrase. I saw the fault and blushed for it. With or without the help of English I began to be near the top of the form as soon as the two scholars had gone up to Oxford.
Apart, however, from the personal influence in the direction of scrupulousness on the part of a master who dropped a beautiful bryony in the middle of discussing the Bacchae with disgust because a boy said the plant was an American, I was hardly doing more than acquiring unrelated information, and forming the habit of reading what did not interest me. I read the Greek Testament slowly and the Bacchae more slowly, and large quantities of history and historical geography rapidly. Some books were less dull than others, but still everything at school was an aimless task performed to the letter only. It cost me many night hours, all the more because I was reading of one thing and thinking of another, and had therefore again and again to go back to a point where I had begun, merely to see the print without understanding.
I made no close friends at the new school. The elder boys either took no notice of me or soon got tired of trying to get something out of me. They alarmed me, and since I did not want to give myself away, and words came darkly and with difficulty when I was disturbed, I said almost nothing: what I did say I often felt to be obscure or false, but for fear of worse I did not correct it. I admired them for their free abundant conversation, their easy manners, their scrupulous nail-cutting during conversation, the material of their clothes, which were so different from my black or blue or grey ready-made clothes. When we were left to ourselves for a time, two of them would begin saying their parts for amateur theatricals; three or four would chat; the one bookworm looked up something in a lexicon wherewith to convict the master; and I would look out of the window at the white clouds, the dark trees, the green grass and the black rooks canting on it, and the pigeons flying up with sticks for their nests, and perhaps made a note of the alternation or mingling of snow, hail, rain and sunshine in late February. Only one boy in the class did I ever visit, though with one or two I had a shy friendly feeling. This one was a boy who lived in a big house with a billiard room. His father had his boots pulled off and his slippers put on by a beautiful youth. I sat at dinner there between a pretty sister and an old aunt who tried hard to get me to talk about my walks and about my printed descriptions of them. For these I had mentioned to several boys, concealing the name of the paper where they appeared, because I was ashamed of it, and at least once when one was making guesses, admitted that I had contributed to a well-known Liberal evening paper — which I had not done. This evening visit was an agony to me. Shyness made me terribly severe and reticent and gave me an appearance of great calm which was perhaps useful to me and was certainly annoying to others. I never went again. The boy made an effort to meet me more than half-way by joining me in Richmond Park to fish, though he was no fisherman. When he arrived I had had a very glorious quarter of an hour. I was the only person fishing there and was trying to land a jack of some size without a landing net, when a girl’s school came by. In my excitement I very brusquely asked one of the girls to bring me my net, which had been out of my reach, which she without consulting the mistress rapidly and very sweetly did, thereby doubling the pleasure and glory of my catch. The fish was over four pounds in weight. The girl — whom I scarcely looked at — was beautiful. It was still early morning. After that I remember the boy coming and being very helpful and obedient in what he did not understand. Above all I remember coming home with my bag on my shoulder and some inches of the fish’s excess sticking out of one corner. My strides were huge. Before opening the gate I smiled proudly in at our windows as I passed. The fish was stuffed, not with sawdust, but with good chicken stuffing, for Sunday’s dinner. As for Johnson, I remember that in the summer after I had left he sent me a letter with a ticket for the school sports, and that I did not go, nor thanked him until some months later, when I pretended that the letter had been mislaid and unopened until that very day. I never saw Johnson again.
On going to the Public School I had without thinking of it dropped all connection with my old school. I never went once again inside its gates. For I was shy and the boys I knew there had been accidental acquaintances with the exception of John. George, though he continued to live close by us, became a mere nodder. At most we stopped and exchanged a few casual questions and answers about our schools, the masters, and so on. The other boys I practically never again set eyes on: if I did I very carefully avoided meeting them, for fear of the discomfort of uselessly disturbing for a moment the sleeping past. I feared also the mere coming face to face with anyone who was not an intimate. People in shops, distant relatives, all older and assured men and women, alarmed me. If I had to speak to them I unconsciously assumed a slow stiff manner and speech that probably did sometimes conceal my intense uneasiness. For those I liked I would have done anything, though what I did was little beyond waiting up and down for John or Henry, outside their houses, or outside some house where they had to call, often for hours and hours, dully but uncomplainingly destroying time, half stupefying myself with recurring thoughts and repeated efforts to stifle them. I was not on friendly terms with more than a very few. Occasionally I saw Jimmy, who had been with me at my last school but one, and lived only a few doors away. For a time he was eager to possess many eggs. Also he was willing to join me now and then on a long walk. It was with him that I set out at daybreak for Ashtead on the first Good Friday after I went to the Public School and soon after my sixteenth birthday. Easter was early, yet pushing through thorny copses we found thrushes’ eggs in hedges and shrubberies not many miles along our road, and climbed amid clouds of wood powder to an empty pigeon’s nest. Not for anything else did we stop, three times perhaps in the fourteen or fifteen miles before dinner. Ewell and Epsom could not stay us. The day was clear, bright, mild — not too mild. I think we spent the afternoon in the woods and returned by train. Jimmy soon gave up such things. He had begun to smoke and to work at a bank. The last time he came with me to Merton was a November afternoon. We started too late. As we looked over the flat fields and line of poplars beyond Morden station the light was already going. Jimmy lit a pipe: our spirits flagged. Suddenly the idea came to Jimmy of the coffee tavern a mile back. He proposed to return. I leapt at the idea so eagerly that he sniggered his snigger as violently as possible. So we returned, running, to eat pastry and drink hot coffee. At long intervals I had Henry or one of the Joneses for company. Of these walks I only know that I crossed new commons and went down new deep chalk lanes in Kent and Surrey, and that once during the greater part of a walk to Curlsdon and back, which was well over twenty miles, my boot was chafing my heel. Periodically for ten years the heel reminded me of that walk by being unable to endure a shoe on it.
My whole holiday on Saturday I spent usually with John, and sometimes Sundays, for it was now increasingly painful to me to sit in chapel, on account of my shyness and the waste of time. Out of doors we fished or walked. Indoors we looked at our collections or skinned a squirrel a gamekeeper in Kent had sent to John — once we had a woodcock — more often it was a rat or a starling. As there was no obvious opportunity for playing games, I never seriously played football or cricket again. At most John and I would join his younger brother in kicking a ball about at nightfall. But some evenings, and for several series of early mornings, we used to put on vests and shirts and run a mile or two. Though we desired to be strong and fit this is all
we ever did deliberately with that end in view. The result was no more than that we could always trot two or three miles or run a mile at a fair pace without discomfort. I at least often went jaded to school from overdoing it before breakfast. John was beautifully made all over, with clear ruddy skin, and could run, jump, climb, swim, and feared neither men nor tree-tops. My body was nothing to be proud or careful of. I was tall for my age, largefooted, skinny everywhere, and as John had pointed out, pigeon chested. I could not jump high or far, or run better than the average boy. I was no climber. On tall trees even where there was plenty of foothold I was very nervous, though not in the least dizzy; and I could not swarm at all. Anything troublesome to climb had to be tackled by John. When we got climbing irons I paid my share but never ventured a yard upon them. That I had quick sight and hearing, and could walk fast and far, was nothing to boast of. How I should have liked physical prowess! How ashamed I was of my chest! What efforts I made to clear away any risk of being called knock-kneed. On the other hand my health was good, except that I sometimes had headaches and in the summer bleeding of the nose. I hardly remember lying in bed during the day since I was ten. I had few coughs, colds or fevers and never anything worth calling influenza. So that one feverish home-coming when I was thirteen was memorable, for as I lay on my bed in the broad daylight I had a not unpleasant half-dream, seeing myself going far up an infinitely long pillared corridor. It may have been soon after this that I began to have a trivial but strange experience which has been repeated once or twice a year ever since. It happens mostly when I am lying down in bed waiting for sleep, and only on nights when I sleep well. I close my eyes and I find myself very dimly seeing expand before me a vague immense space enclosed with invisible boundaries. Yet it can hardly be called seeing. All is grey, dull, formless, and I am aware chiefly by some other means than sight of vast unshapely towering masses of a colourless subject which I feel to be soft. Through these things and the space I grope slowly. They tend to fade away, but I can recover them by an effort perhaps half a dozen times, and do so because it is somehow pleasant or alluring. Then I usually sleep. During the experience I am well awake and am remembering that it is a repetition, wondering what it means and if anything new will occur, and taking care not to disturb the process.
Thomas’ memorial stone near Steep
Agny Military Cemetery, France — Thomas’ final resting place
Thomas’ grave
Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas Page 59